Last December the new IBSA Europe Committee met in Eger, Hungary on the occasion of the IBSA European Judo Championships. The objective of this meeting was to form a cohesive Working Committee from all four corners of Europe who will act as liaisons to all IBSA members in Europe, offering primary support and advice on all IBSA matters.

Headed by Sally Wood-Lamont (Romania) as the Chair, the Committee comprises Alessandra Martinelli (Italy), Christof Baer (Switzerland), Angel Luis Gómez Blázquez (Spain), Bojan Jacimovic (Serbia), Mick McGuire (UK), Wolfgang Moll (Austria) and Teemu Ruohonen (Finland). David Stirton (Spain), IBSA Webmaster and Henk van Aller (Netherlands), IBSA Secretary General also joined us.

First on the agenda was the website and we all agreed that the new website was looking much more attractive and user friendly. Facebook and Twitter accounts will be launched in 2014 but the success of this social media depends totally on your input. We require sports news on a regular basis.

It is evident that the most active IBSA sport is Goalball and we recommended to the IBSA Executive Board that all IBSA sports follow their good practice and promote and organize their sport using their strategy. We also recommended that IBSA adopt the UN HDI index with regard to membership fees.

A proposal to license all IBSA athletes has been proposed in order to create a master database, which will assist IBSA’s management greatly as well as being able to offer performance and classification statistics for VI athletes worldwide. A discussion was initiated regarding the recent limitation of IPC events for B2 athletes. Classification was also discussed and we proposed that IBSA follows the IPC procedures for all Medical Diagnostic Forms (MDF’s) submission. A lively discussion also started with regard to the costs of competitions and again the European Committee offered 12 recommendations to the IBSA Executive Committee for consideration.

This was the first meeting and through animated and structured discussions, we established a very good basis from where we can progress to offering constructive suggestions to the overall strategic principles of IBSA. The IBSA European Committee wants to be an active organization and we look forward to hearing more from our fellow members in Europe and to working together over the next four years.

Sally Wood-Lamont,
IBSA Europe Chair
[email protected]